NB: This is a guest article by Brian Searl, CEO and president of Insider Perks.
It is a phrase that we have seen tossed around in the online world relentlessly for the past few weeks - Content Farms.
Google has released a Chrome Extension for filtering them and reporting back the individual results and it has updated its search algorithms to knock the sites down.
But what exactly is the definition of a content farm though and how could it possibly be related to the travel industry?
According to Wikipedia:
"The term content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines."
That's certainly a mouthful and it really is a rather broad description isn't it? Let's break it down.
One of the largest companies you have probably heard mentioned with regards to content farms in the last few weeks is Demand Media.
The company produces hundreds of articles on a daily basis which may or may not be relevant to a search query on Google.
You may argue that the articles are of low quality, but that doesn't mean that there isn't one person that finds them useful or even a hundred.
In fact, Demand Media pays for most of their content and does so with competitive rates. We're not talking about them today though, I just wanted to make sure you understood why they were being attacked and why we are even discussing content farms to begin with.
Now that you know why Demand Media is in the spotlight, refer back to the Wikipedia definition above.
The first part says that a content farm is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers.
Stop. What major publishing company doesn't?
We're focused on travel today so let's look at a site like TravelPod, which was highlighted as being one the major travel companies affected by Google's change.
TravelPod, as far as I can tell, has never paid for a single piece of content in its 14 year history. They don't employ any freelance writers and those that do post, do so for free. Is that worse than Demand Media? Huffington Post does not pay its travel writers anything either. The list could go on and on.
On the other side of the spectrum is Uptake, which was also written about in the same article reference above.
While companies like TravelPod and Huffington Post at least make an attempt to create original and compelling content, Uptake simply aggregates content from a bunch of already existing travel review sites into its own (and some self-penned blog content).
This was another reason cited by Google in its reason for a change: duplicate content.
Nobody is saying that the service Uptake provides isn't valuable, but in the end it is copying content a user can find elsewhere. Same goes for every single travel site that incorporates TripAdvisor reviews as a form of its own content.
Take that even one step further and look at TripAdvisor itself.
The entire site is based on millions of people writing quick travel reviews, that they aren't compensated for, and as a result give the site more content to rank higher in search engines.
Isn't that a content farm by the Wikipedia definition?
Whether you have people writing 500 word blog posts or 100 word reviews, the staggering amount of content being created on a daily basis could easily be labeled a content farm.
Now, before anyone gets really angry, I'm not saying that TripAdvisor is a content farm. I'm simply pointing out that it could easily be interpreted as one.
Google has opened a huge can of worms that cannot be closed again. In fact, it comes dangerously close to the line of censorship.
While many of us who constantly search for new and compelling content may agree with the majority of its assessments, what about the end consumer?
Who decides which articles are of high quality and which ones are not? Google? The infamous bot? This is something that needs to be clearly defined to website owners if they plan on making these kinds of large and dramatic algorithm changes.
For years website owners have dealt with duplicate content penalties and so it should come as no surprise to sites like Uptake when their rankings plummet for that very reason, or at least what we assume is the reason.
It might have a useful service, but it is duplicating content. For sites like TravelPod, it may produce tons of content every single day but again, who has a right to say that it isn't useful? At least its content is original for the most part.
We are heading down a very dangerous path. A path that could lead to the permanent end of content licensing as we know it today.
After all, who will license content from someone, who already has it published online, when they fear what Google might do? Sure, you can call me paranoid and maybe I am, but is it really a big stretch?
The stated goal of Google is to remove spam from their search engines - I for one fully support this.
There is nothing I hate more than wading through dozens of results pages to find good content.
I'm writing this article from an objective point of view though.
My company does not rank on the first page for our main keyword phrase "travel videos". I can't stand seeing poorly designed sites with no other content on them than 2,000 embedded YouTube videos ranking higher than us.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit here and say they should be penalized though. Obviously people find value in them or they wouldn't be ranking so high.
By the definition above though, they are content farms as well with purely duplicated content.
You can't simply pick and choose which sites are content farms and which ones aren't. If Google is going to play God and choose which sites to devalue based on a computer algorithm, then at the very least they should be posting to everyone exactly how they reached that decision.
If not, we all run the risk of waking up one morning to find our site lumped in with Demand Media. For the future of content creation as a whole, that is not a world I want to live in.
NB: This is a guest article by Brian Searl, CEO and president of Insider Perks.